On Stalin's Speech of 19 August 1939

On August 19, 1939, Stalin held a meeting with his Politburo. At this meeting Stalin delivered a speech, about his decision and the motives behind to sign the non-aggression treaty with Germany. Leaks of the speech appeared as soon as 26 August 1939 in The Times, London. A bit later in the Swedish press, and few months later in the Swiss press as well. TASS (the official Soviet News Agency) came out with denial announcement about this information as being untrue, of course. Ever since, the Soviet mighty propaganda has not forgotten to mention here and there that there was no Politburo meeting held on 19 August 1939.

This propaganda had been picked up by many western historians and repeated in their works as well. The reason is simple: in that speech Stalin explained his motives for signing the pact. The motives were logic and simple (Stalin’s typical style), and did nothing sensational, except to reaffirm what Stalin has been talking about ever since 1925, or namely: to start another major European war, as a repetition of WWI, where the imperialist states would exhaust each other in fighting, while the Soviet Union would await the perfect moment to enter the war fresh, with fully prepared Red Army and country to evoke the further continuation of the world revolution.

These motives and aims however, place Stalin and the Soviet Union at the top of the list of responsibility for the beginning of World War II. And neither modern Russia, nor the western historians who (willingly or not) had missed the whole point, and therefore had published numerous works with complete non-sense, are either willing to accept it or discuss it.

So instead they either ignore it, like G. Gorodetskey usually does, or claim it was a forgery like John Lukach does. The information about the speech was reinforced by a publication in the Russian Novi Mir journal, in the early 1990s. All these sources, including the diary of the Comintern general secretary G. Domotrov reinforce the authenticity of the speech. In fact the archival number of the file where it could be found was published, except the so called Spetzialniya Papka archive, is still top secret and inaccessible today.

For further and detailed information on this topic, and for the full text of the speech, please go to:

http://www.carlonordling.se/ww2/stalin_speech_complete.html